No.307 : White Chamber (2018)

White Chamber at the IMDb

Britain is in chaos and nationalism is on the rise! No, it’s not a documentary but a film set sometime “Soon”. The film starts with some ponderous narration with a chap waving a flag on top of Glastonbury Tor. There has been a civil war with a totalitarian government squaring up against a rebellion led by the UK Liberation army.

We then cut to a bright white box and realise that the budget has been spent on that big flag the bloke was waving. A woman wakes up in said box and starts conversing with a distorted voice - ‘where am I?’ ‘who are you?’ ‘can I get my money back?’. After some cruel treatment via the box’s handy hot and cold floor, the true horror slowly dawns on us - will the whole film just be a woman yelling at a wall?

Happily not, after a while a face appears in the wall and it’s that bloke in the black robes off the ‘Mummy’ films. The woman claims to be a new start called Ruth but our man keeps pressing for more details about the operation and her role in the shady experiments he knows that goes on there.

Eventually the chamber opens up and another compartment is revealed to contain a woman with a pretty bad chemical peel. The two fight and Ruth gives her the finger so to speak. We then dissolve to a ‘5 Day’s earlier’ caption and we realise it’s our old favourite, the non-linear narrative.

We meet our woman greeting a new recruit called Ruth - blatant identity theft right there! The man behind the voice (or at least someone who looks like him) is now in the chamber and our woman is the head scientist. It turns out interrogation isn’t their goal but to test new amphetamines that can enhance the abilities of soldiers. We get a bit more back story from an old bloke who looks like Bill Nighy and her off the coffee adverts from the 80’s.

Who will triumph in this battle of wits? Who are ‘the good guys’? and can I have my 90 minutes back please?

This was an OK film but it’s limited scope and in your face politics had me against it from near the start. The main female character played by Shauna Macdonald wasn’t likeable at all, even in the opening section where we were meant to be on her side. Later, when she was revealed to be the evil scientist, albeit one with some heartache, I still wasn’t convinced ,and she was more irritating than scary or despicable.

Coffee woman and the new start didn’t have a lot to do with the later failing to convince in her Road to Damascus type conversion. The guy off the Mummy films was OK but a bit preachy and overly manic when hepped up on goofballs.

The politics were terribly in your face - literally, with one scene having the character telling you how crappy the country is straight to camera, before cutting to another for a reaction shot. Subtle this was not.

To be fair the film did manage to keep my interest, but given we knew after 20 minutes that the roles would be reversed the tension gained was allowed to dissipate. The film did look cheap with most of the action happening in some corridors. It looked like they had broken into an office block for the shoot but couldn’t access the rooms, only the stairs and landings. In places it was almost like a film school project with ropey dialogue delivered in a flat, unbelievable manner by unconvincing actors.

It’s better than being locked in a white box - but only just.

Best Bit : Finger Buffet  ‘W’ Rating : 11/23

No.183 : World Gone Wild (1987)

World Gone Wild at the IMDb

Well here’s a first for the 100+ W Movies Quest - no not a reader, although that’d be nice - an actual request. OK it was a request borne out of vanity as the person making the request only did so as he almost shares the name of one of the characters, but we’ll take what we can get.

This dystopian action thriller is absolutely dreadful and I doubt you’d be able to find it anywhere apart from my hard drive and numerous land fill sites - but let’s have a look anyway.

The film opens with some scene setting narration. The production evidently didn’t have the cash for a scrolling paragraph so instead poor old Bruce Dern is tasked with setting the scene. It’s the late 21st century and a 75 year war has left most people dead and it hasn’t rained in 50 years. Realising their shaky premise and the abundance of clouds in the film, they add in ‘cruelly there are clouds but no rain’ - you can’t fault science like that.

After a dreadfully tacky credits sequence with the cheapest TV movie graphics and over filtered colours we get to the nub of the action. The writer has seen ‘Mad Max 2’ and thought ‘Yeah no one will notice if I steal that’ so he sets us up in a remote compound filled with people in white clothes and hair bands. He cleverly substitutes the rare resource from gasoline to water to make it all original. Anyway the school only has four books, so at least it’s an improvement from today’s education cuts - little bit of politics there, and the kids have no pencils and a teacher lacking most of her clothes.

The lesson on etiquette is interrupted when Adam Ant appears, towed by cape wearing lackeys, resplendent in his flying goggles and in a hollowed out helicopter. I ‘d say ‘you couldn’t make it up’ but clearly someone has - drugs really screw you up. Ant is playing the ridiculously named ‘Derek Abernathy’ and after spouting a lot of shite for five minutes starts shooting up all the peaceful locals along with his dead eyed henchmen. Total carnage is averted when Bruce Dern turns up and kills a bad guy by booting a hubcap into his throat - clearly he’s not a man to be messed with.

Ant crawls off with some of the settlement’s young men (Operation Yew Tree?) to brainwash them into his cult, yes that's cult, while those who remain take stock and fix their hair. They know Ant will be back and Dern sets off to town for reinforcements. The town is a hell hole with women in basques running about while dying babies are denied water. Sounds like my kinda town! After some recruiting of colourful sidekicks Dern returns to fortify the settlement and wait Ant’s next attack. Can the mismatched gang of renegades and mercenaries take on Ant’s formation bike riding team of white clad brainwashed youths? Will the inevitable explosions kick start the environment? Hell yes!

This blog has been guilty of exaggerating the awfulness of many films but I defy anyone to see this and declare it even a partial success. Well OK, pished up students may be able to laugh ironically at the many plot holes, dreadful acting and atrocious dialogue, but we’re a bit higher brow at this blog.

For a start where, in a world with no rain for 50 years, do they find an endless supply of brilliant white clothes, never mind endless bullets and enough TNT to make 9/11 look like a box of Aldi fireworks? For a world scrabbling in the dirt to survive everyone looks well nourished and there is frankly an over abundance of motorcycles and capes.

OK, we can set these gripes aside, as long as the cast is strong and the plot is tight and coherent. Er, sorry. Ant fails to stand and deliver in the acting stakes and it is baffling how he managed to get through the audition. To be fair in a film where “Does Pinocchio have a wooden dick?” is the best line, the standards were never going to be high. Bruce Dern fails to deliver his usual mania and he seems largely disinterested in a film that doubtlessly looked more fun in the script than in reality.

The gang of misfits were uniformly dreadful from ‘Nitro’ the dynamite expert to some other guy who created a ‘snake pit’ trap with precisely 4 small snakes in it - at least they squashed them together for the close up
shot - Indiana Jones this was not.

The plot was virtually non-existent and they even had two goes at the finale both of which failed to elicit any excitement or tension. Ant had one of the lowest key demises of any movie baddie despite being seemingly bullet proof for the first 90 minutes. The big conclusion was ridiculous as it was predictable and frankly if the new rains had washed this effort out of existence no one would be complaining. Well apart from Mr Abernethy at any rate…

W Rating 6/23
Best Bit - Ant ain't no Goody Two Shoes